Fingers across your chest

"I don't feel comfortable doing this," I said carefully.

My breath misted into the cold night air around us. The silhouette of a circus just down the hill and it's dark, bleak tent peaks were a shadow that almost faded into the deep midnight sky. As if to cast my worries even further into my stomach the sky was starless and not even a sliver of pale moonlight glowed in its bleak black.

I shuddered.

How many nights were ever like this?

I thought if I were to count, it would stop at zero.

My skin crawled with my own fears, a sense that almost held me too frozen to step closer.

Someone brushed past me, I looked up to see two people walking towards it, their soft whispers unintelligible, almost as if they were speaking in another language.

The flowering tree beside me, waved in the wind, its branches dancing back and forth, the deep pink blossoms bouncing in circles as it swayed.

I looked at it with hollow, ragged eyes.

Flowers, fragile, fresh, peak of the season birds, all where none had been before tonight... Their colors a stringent blasphemy in trees that were never meant to carry their existence.

A circus in a field that never was.

And all the people in the town trickling towards it like zombies of the night.

All of them knowing where to go, yet not a single person speaking of it ever. Just like me, they found themselves almost dragged from their houses into a summer night that should have been warm but was cold and eerie.

Yet, for them their voices were filled with an inexplicable excitement.

Unexplained? A soft pressure on my chest forcefully released and I felt as if someone were trying to melt away all my nervous fears.

No...

Was it me that had the wrong feeling?

Was the unexplainable thing really my own sense of dread?

As my feet took steps forward, closer towards the circus that had popped up overnight, my stomach rung with untold fears, and a growing eerie sense of fingers creeping across my chest pulling me towards it.

The feeling made my mind scream...

Help.

But no one was going to.

Because... They already belonged to the circus.